Remarketing – A Second Chance at a First Impression

By Chris Behan

Let me begin by asking you a couple of questions. Would you employ a salesperson who never followed up with any of their prospects? One who simply presented your product or service and if the prospect did not buy on the spot, they’d forget all about them? Of course not, but you may be doing exactly that with your website.

What if there was an easy way for your website to automatically follow up with everyone that visited it even if the visitors never gave you any of their personal information? There is, and it works.

It’s called “remarketing,” and it is a program offered by Google that allows you to essentially retarget or remarket to individuals that came to your website, but did not complete a required action, such as placing an order or completing a contact/request-a-quote form. The program employs commonly used browser “cookies” to follow previous site visitors. Here’s how it works: a visitor clicks on to your site, his or her browser is “cookied,” and then Google tracks that person for a given period of time, showing them ads for your business as they visit other sites on the web. These ads can appear to your site’s previous visitors for as long as 540 days, but I generally recommend 90-day campaigns. In addition to tailoring the length of your campaign, you can also change your remarketing ads over the course of your campaign to maximize their impact. For instance, you can set your ads to change 30 days into the campaign if you’d like to promote a special sale at that point.

The remarketing of your website, company, products and/or services is carried out on millions of websites that have signed up with Google and agreed to display banner advertisements. Many of these sites are highly visited, highly credible, and very well known. Of course this sounds great, but like any good businessperson who carefully monitors marketing expenditures, you’re probably wondering what specific benefits and ROI this program offers.

Free Advertising & Branding

Since the remarketing program is part of Google’s Pay-Per-Click Display Network, you will only be charged if someone actually clicks on the banner advertisement, meaning your ad will show up on potentially thousands of websites totally free. The branding implications of this program can be huge. Remarketing gives visitors to your site the impression that your company is a big one, with the ability to advertise all over the web.

Inexpensive Traffic

Another major benefit of remarketing is the cost per click. Generally speaking, the cost per click associated with remarketing is about one-fifth the cost of more traditional pay-per-click marketing.

Nurture Your Prospects

When you undertake a remarketing program, you are simply following up with visitors that had previous interest in your products or services. Remarketing allows you to remind them of that previous interest, make them a new offer, answer lingering questions, and reinforce the decision you want them to make.

Get Really Specific

You can serve different banner advertisements to users based on the products they viewed on your website. For example, if a user was on my website reviewing our Facebook advertising services, the banner following him or her would speak specifically to Facebook advertising.

In Closing…

Google’s remarketing program is much more powerful than many Internet marketing strategies and traditional marketing tactics. Any company that has ever handed out a business card, brochure, or attended a trade show or networking event should have an active remarketing program. It is simply too targeted and too affordable to ignore.

About the Author
Chris Behan is the President and Chief Optimization Officer of Socius Marketing, Inc. (www.sociusmarketing.com), Tampa’s top-ranked search engine optimization company, which provides Internet marketing services to small, medium, and large businesses looking to expand their online presence. With offices in Tampa and Atlanta and clients across the country, Socius Marketing is one of the largest, and fastest-growing online lead generation firms in the United States.  Specializing in organic, white-hat search engine optimization, Chris has more than 11 years of Internet marketing experience and has helped hundreds of companies generate leads online. Chris can be reached at chris@sociusmarketing.com or by calling (813) 282-8300. – Offices Rocky Point, Tampa